The Media party failure

by Cameron Slater on November 10, 2016 at 8:00am

Jim Rutenberg at the New York Times discusses the Media party disconnect with the electorate.

All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.

For not the first time this year, the news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers weren’t just a poor guide for election night — they were an off-ramp away from what was actually happening.

The evening wasn’t over as of this writing, but even if Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, pulls off a squeaker, no one predicted a night like this.

The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.

Journalists didn’t question the polling data when it confirmed their gut feeling that Mr. Trump could never in a million years pull it off. They at times portrayed Trump supporters who still believed he had a shot as being out of touch with reality. In the end, it was the other way around.

It was just a few months ago that so much of the European media failed to foresee the vote in Britain to leave the European Union. Election 2016, thy name is Brexit.

Election Day had been preceded by more than a month of declarations that the race was close but essentially over. And that assessment held even after the late-October news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reviewing a new batch of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory would be “substantial but not overwhelming,” The Huffington Post had reported, after assuring its readers that “she’s got this.” That more or less comported with The New York Times’s Upshot projection on Tuesday evening that Mrs. Clinton was an 84 percent favorite to win the presidency. By 10:30 p.m., however, that projection had switched around, remarkably, to 93 percent in favor of Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee.

When the left-wing, including the Media party, attack, insult, bully, harangue and negatively affect people who declare support for a political candidate that differs from their own views, it is no wonder that people keep their support to themselves and lie to pollsters. Social media including Facebook and Twitter just enabled the bullying. Yesterday all that failed. The voters handed them their arse.

We saw this in New Zealand in 2014 when I was attacked, when my income was boycotted, my friends threatened and media blacklisted me…all after a left-wing criminal hacked my communications. The voters said otherwise.

I expect we will see it again next year, but they should learn from this election in the US. The voters are important, they aren’t stupid and they despise the media.

I suspect that the left-wing and the Media party won’t learn from this.

I had a wry smile when I found out all of the NZ media were sitting at Clinton’s campaign function. What a bunch of complete dickheads…especially Patrick Gower and Barry Soper.

The howls of the left will all miss one thing…they caused the election of Donald Trump.